NVIDIA GeForce 306.23 WHQL Download & Discussion

Its always been like this for me

 

My buddy with a GTX 570 said he was getting freezes / driver stopped responding in WoW with 306.23's too. He was going to roll back to 305.xx driver. After researching this, I found numerous posts on the WoW forums with the same issues. Seems BF3 and WoW to have issues with crashing the most with these drivers.

 

Everytime I update my motherboard bios I make sure to re-check stability of my overclock:

- 20 pass of Linx with the latest linpack directories.
- 4 hour prime95 blend
- 4 hour prime95 small FFTs
- Memtest for about 30 mins. Looping test 5 and 8.

Rig is water cooled with PA120.3, 3x Yate loons, D5 (pump), MCW-60 on the GPU and XSPC rasa on the CPU.

Everything comes back as stable as the previous bios. I just updated to this bios the other day but 306.xx were installed under both the latest and the previous bioses for the P8P67 motherboard.

I'd give 306.xx another shot but I keep seeing people posting about their crashes. Like the few posts above me. And my buddy with a GTX 570 just updated to 306.23 a couple nights ago and within mins he crashed out of WoW multiple times. He was going to try and play some BF3 last night. I'm pretty much convinced from the time I've put into troubleshooting and the other folks posting with the exact same crashes the drivers are at fault. Everyone with the crashes can roll back and the problems are 100% gone.

hnizdo - Batman AC is Batman AC man, that game has always been a stutter fest for me. The worst parts were outside flying around / moving from building to building for me. I've tried dx9, disabling AO, disabling blur and physx. Someone noted disabling FXAA but I tried that and didn't think the game was any smoother at those problem parts.

 

The install gave me a black screen, had to reboot and remove everything with driver sweeper in safe mode

 

dnottis

btw those stressing apps wont stress your system to the max. Gpu is still sitting idle (pcie to cpu communication), that's why i said what i said before - some drivers are more sensitive to system OC (cpu/ram).

Loop 5-6 repeats (vsync off, lower reso so its cpu bound)
-Resident Evil5 dx10 - variable test benchmark (4xaa),
-Metro2033 (@ high, aaa),
-FarCry2 - long ranch (4xaa)..

If all passes then yes blame the driver.

 

That was after a motherboard bios update, I check the CPU / Ram stability for the GPU I ran EVGA OC scanner, furmark and or Kombuster - on top of just gaming with it.

Sometimes I will run Prime95 and one of those at the same time to see how my temps are with my water cooled setup.

 

Kombustor, furmark and Evga scanner is nothing, it throttles your gpu anyway and also it doesnt stress your cpu/ram/gpu much at the same time.


btw, Bf3 is very ram/cpu depended, just like those benchmarks i mentioned above and if it crashes is not a good sign. Just saying, gl.

 

No but if you run Prime95 AND kombuster at the same time you will get a pretty good idea of how well your water cooled setup can remove heat. Again, this is the first driver I've had issues with. I've been using Nvidias drivers for awhile, went from 480 to 580 to 680, all overclocked and water cooled.

I won't re-install the 306 drivers on my setup.

 

This new driver works OK; but not with you-tube or flash 11.5 playback I can not get medium screens and HD with these drivers 302.23 whql :bang:

firefox v15.0.1

Flash; Windows Internet Explorer (and other browsers that support Internet Explorer ActiveX controls and plug-ins) 11.4.402.265
Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Opera (and other plugin-based browsers) 11.4.402.265
Chrome (Pepper-based Flash Player) 11.3.31.232

 

Okay went back to 306.23 because suddenly with 301.42 drivers in CoD Black Ops the cards would clock themselves down to 324mhz core and go up to 500 and to 600mhz and back down again. In the menus they'd clock down to their lowest. Clock speeds on all 3 cards went up and down (not core boost). Really strange.... wasn't a problem with my GTX 580 cards.

 

Hi all,
could someone write down settings with GTX670 in BF3 with these drivers c1: ?

Thanks in advance

 

You question is invalid. You did not specify resolution. If you play on 1680x1050 = ALL MAXED OUT. IF you play with 2560x1440 its lower settings.

 

I turn off motion blur, and max everything else.
Sometimes on B2K maps it might drop to 45fps for a sec but usually stays at 60 fps using 1080p

I used these drivers and my system crashed after 20 minutes when playing BF3.
I'll try again later.

 

600 series are designed to clock themselves down to save power/heat when not being utilized... This is proving to be quiet a bad move. GW2 has serious issues because of it.

 

Doesn't "Prefer maximum performance" instead of adaptive fix this?

 

First thing I tried. It doesn't. That option has been around for a while. Even with my 580GTX. Not sure what it does.

I did find a way to lock the core clock on my 690GTX.

http://www.obr-hardware.com/2012/05/exclusive-guide-how-to-disable-gpu.html

I don't actually notice much of an improvement in GW2 though. Guess I'm kind of screwed. I'll just take a break and see if anything improves in a few months.

 

Yep, sry I play @ 1080p.
I though some trick and tips like
- using vsync on / off / adaptive, frame limiter
- CPU core parking disabling
- max prerender frames, ena/disabl triplebuffering
- icrease priority of bf3.exe in win
etc...

I made a fresh installation of WIN 7 x64, fully updated, 306.23, intel INF drivers, MS antivirus but i still feel some kind of lag... :3eyes:

 

Don't know what the issue is, but after 20 seconds a YouTube Video goes Green and skips all the way to the end.

 

np at all here .. works perfect .. keeper 4 me

 

Ok my findings:

After having the 306.23 driver crash my system at random points in Battlefield 3 when playing Armoured Kill and once when I was on Caspian Border, I decided to revert back to the 304.79 drivers and try them out over this weekend. The screen would freeze and I'd get lots of little green lines all over the screen. Hard reset would be required to get back into Windows apart from once where I was able to kill the BF3.exe process with Ctrl, Alt Del.

Before going over the the 306 family drivers I'd not experienced any issues in Battlefield 3.

From Friday morning through till around 1am Monday morning (obviously not continuously) I've been hammering Battlefield 3. I've not had one single crash and it ran very smooth. So I now firmly believe there is an issue with the 306 family driver set with Battlefield 3.

I have tried other games like Sleeping Dogs, Transformers - Fall of Cybertron and Skyrim and I did not get a crash or anything out of the ordinary.

My system specs are as follows:

i7 920 @ stock
GTX 580 @ stock
6 Gig DDR3
Auzentech X-FI Forte 7.1
700W OCZ PSU
Windows 7 x64 (All updated)
nVidia Drivers: 304.79 / 306.23 WHQL